A break in the California Aqueduct has halted the flow of water in the canal that supplies millions of Southern California residents, but there’s no concern that taps will run dry, officials said Wednesday.
Reservoirs below the break hold enough water to supply customers until a work crew repairs the damaged canal lining, said Ted Thomas, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Water Resources.
Don’t let this week’s sunny skies and balmy temperatures fool you — El Nino isn’t gone, it’s just taking a bit of a breather, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service said Wednesday.
While last week’s saturating storms have been notably absent this week, meteorologist Emily Thornton said the expectation is still that Southern California will see more rain than usual this winter.
Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip in the House of Representatives, explained how the fight to get more water for farmers played out in the last session — a fight which ended with no resolution.
We encourage him to keep up that fight.
The congressman placed the defeat of a water bill at the feet of California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, saying the long-time senator pulled her support at the 11th hour, leaving no time for negotiations and thus, killing the bill. Feinstein blamed Republicans for the bill’s demise, saying she had never agreed to any part of the proposed legislation which would have moved more water out of the San Joaquin Delta to the Central Valley and also paved the way to develop more storage of water in the future. McCarthy said she pulled her support at the last moment, saying he was “blind-sided” by her action.
Meteorologists are unsure if the current El Niño weather patterns will provide enough rainfall to pull California out of its historic four-year drought. But we do know that things are trending that way after a wet December that marked the halfway point in the water year.
Particularly, the second quarter of the water year finished with the highest number of inches since 2010-11. From Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, Exeter Irrigation District reported 2.36 in October, 2.05 in November and 3.30 inches in December, for a total of 7.71 inches of rain. Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District showed a similar trend with .99 inches in October, 2.05 inches in November and 3.12 inches in December, for a total of 6.16 inches. But the real story was in Ivanhoe, where Ivanhoe Irrigation District reported 3.52 inches of rain in October, 1.73 inches in November and 2.48 inches in December, for a total of 7.73 inches of rain.
As robust storms continue to move through California, El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean are already starting to weaken, a National Weather Service expert says.
Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that serve as a key fuel for the weather phenomenon are starting to cool, although a strong El Nino is expected to persist in the Northern Hemisphere through the winter, said Michelle Mead, a National Weather Service warning coordinator.
The current weather pattern, fed by a dominant subtropical southern jet stream, is typical for a strong El Nino winter, Mead said in an email.
U.S. lawmakers from California have more political turbulence ahead of them with the introduction Tuesday of a bill to settle a long-running San Joaquin Valley irrigation drainage dispute.
The legislation by Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, would implement a sweeping drainage settlement reached between the Obama administration and the Westlands Water District. It also reignites some of the same regional and partisan conflicts that have dogged past water bills.
It’s finally raining in California — just when we’d begun to think that it would never rain again. But the state is deep in water debt. Traditionally, California has depended on snowmelt for about a third of its water. The recent storms have gotten California’s snowpack up to slightly above average for this time of year, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to refill reservoirs.
It looks like this El Niño — which will rank among the strongest on record — has passed its peak in terms of tropical ocean temperatures, but it’s not going away anytime soon. In fact, the biggest El Niño impacts on the U.S., like rain and snow for California, are probably still to come.
The country has already started to feel the influence of El Niño with a recent spate of storms that dumped much-needed precipitation on California. The cold winter months are when El Niño holds sway over North American weather patterns, generally leading to cooler and wetter weather over the southern tier of the U.S. and warmer and drier conditions over the northern parts of the country and southern Canada.
El Niño is finally making its presence felt with a series of welcome storms. Since we don’t yet know if it will put a significant dent in California’s epic drought, state regulators are preparing the next version of an emergency regulation that has required statewide mandatory conservation in urban areas since last June.
An initial framework released last month by the State Water Resources Control Board staff, however, is raising deep concerns that the regulation could take a critical tool off the table – local water projects developed to buffer the effects of drought.
A record-breaking storm has been battering California, as well as other states throughout the nation, for more than two weeks now due to the El Niño, a term given to the warming of the Pacific Ocean which causes drastic fluctuations in weather all over the world.
“A parade of strong Pacific storms characteristic of a strong El Niño event will batter the state this week and will likely bring damaging flooding by the time the second storm in the series rolls through on Wednesday”.
